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Meet international citizen Ingvar Kenne

Ingvar Kenne

Photographer

AHB were a little nervous to meet up with Ingvar Kenne, Swedish-born Sydney-based photographer, best known for his signature square-framed portraits. There is something beyond four equal sides that makes his photographs perfect somehow… For an artist at loathe to extrapolate too much on exactly what his photographs mean, there are plenty of ‘somethings’ and ‘somehows’ – usually ‘somewhere’s too – at play. Teas and coffees on the table, we got stuck into it.

You’re a bit of an everywhere man, travelled far and wide, emigrated from your home country – we’re interested, what does adventure mean to you?

For me I think I always challenged myself, as far as travel goes, I like to see things through. Adventure is more for yourself than anything. For me, climbing a mountain was one of my biggest moments. I mean, if you’re a mountaineer that means nothing, this was just 1000 metres, but it was a hard scramble up, I was on my own… Adventure is when you excel on what you knew previously. Go outside your boundaries that you’re very used to and you try something that you’ve never done before.

Joni, Farmer, Villa Amengral, Chile, 1995

Anders Birgersson, Traveler, Playa Esterillos, Costa Rica, 1994

Has your taste for adventure changed with experience?

Yeah I think what’s happened is that I can’t practice my own adventures, and haven’t been able to since I had a family really. My work takes me places for a short stint; it took me to prison in New Zealand. I’d never been in a prison before.It’s interesting, you still get confronted – in a good way – just seeing things.

But I haven’t been able to do that kind of adventure – pre-email, where you kind of give away your apartment, you pack everything in boxes and chuck it in the basement at your parents and you say, “I’ll be back.” Choosing to switch off for six months, that type of adventure is long gone, I think. You’d have to be a monk to do that.

Jetara. Camel Herder, Sam, Rajasthan, India, 1996

So you grew up in Sweden, and left when you were twenty-something to go on the trip that became Chasing Summer. Had you travelled like this, to that extent, before?

Yeah, it was my third big trip. (The first) was in ‘87, I went around Australia and New Zealand hitchhiking. I wanted to go home after a week, I was dead scared, in some Kings Cross hostel. Some Swedish kids had done train-hopping around Europe, but I never did it. I went north, trekking mountains instead.

I was dead scared, in some Kings Cross hostel. Some Swedish kids had done train-hopping around Europe, but I never did it.

I got back and managed to get into photo university with the work from that trip. I did 3 years there, saved a little money somehow and then went back to New Zealand with my girlfriend at the time. We bought horses and rode across the Southern Alps on horseback for 2 months.

My horse went lame, and we had to give them away. The entire trip lasted a year, and that’s when I went to India, and Nepal. To Ladakh.

Anonymous, Diver, Port Augusta, 2004

Per & Tinker, Frazer, Colorado, USA, 1996

That was your top of the mountain moment.

It was 5 years all that time. Go back home, cash up, and leave again. And not really committing to being a photographer. I felt like I’d sort of wasted a lot of opportunities photographically, so I wanted to be focussed during (Chasing Summer).

I think it’s so easy to be a photographer and always talk about projects and ideas but forget to take the photographs. Without them you got nothing to discuss. You can’t even talk about whatever you’re up to, because you’re only thinking. You’ve got to take the photos.

Nik Robinson, Art Director, Pickle Bottle Creek, Australia, 2009

I’ve read about the careful consideration you give to the composition of your frame, but that for Citizen, you didn’t really have a clear idea of what it was going to be… Is your process kind of an amalgam of the two, embracing randomness but providing structure?

I think that’s a good way to sum it up. Obviously each project is different. In Chasing Summer, I kind of realised what it was half way through, I just kept taking pictures of people. I got proof sheets sent to me every 3 months so I knew where it was heading and the focus was there. Citizen is a totally different beast.

When I got here 20 years ago, I started working as a waiter because I didn’t know anyone. All I had to show for myself was this box of portraits from my trips. After 3 years I finally got into some magazines, a few portraits here and there. So many people didn’t like it, but I was lucky there were a few people who did… All I ended up doing was adding more photographs with the same parameters.

When I got here 20 years ago, I started working as a waiter because I didn’t know anyone. All I had to show for myself was this box of portraits from my trips.

Citizen, the genesis, or the idea of it, came about when the work dried up because people didn’t want me to shoot film anymore but digital, or they tried to art direct it. So I stopped working for people, after 10 years. I started looking back at what I had and realised this is just an extension of Chasing Summer. Put those photographs with Citizen and mix ’em around people wouldn’t think its out of place. So that’s when I thought, let’s try to put it together in a book.

Arghavan, Holiday Maker, Gachsar, Iran, 1996

So your style is pretty much coming out of that one trip from Sweden, and that one book.

I think that (Chasing Summer) formed me completely as a photographer. I think it came from the luxury of being away from everything you knew for so long, and pop culture. I never watched television during that time, read magazines, I was just in my own head. It wasn’t a discussion with anyone else but myself. Maybe that’s why it became quite defined in that time.

You don’t bark into situations – you can, but you’re going to get rejected or end up in trouble.

What did you learn, from that trip and the focus?

I was naturally shy, and that was the biggest thing. I had a lot of fear. If it taught me anything it was just to handle people better. You don’t know what you’re gonna eat, or where you’re gonna sleep, or who you can trust. You’re senses are heightened when you travel, that’s why it’s so fun.

You have to pull back sometimes. I never got a no, probably because there was an ‘ok’ floating around there before I even asked. They’ve looked at you, or they’ve smiled quickly at you, and it’s going be good. You don’t bark into situations – you can, but you’re going to get rejected or end up in trouble.

We get asked often about the relationship between travel and privilege. That’s exactly what I see travel as, in terms of adventure, people don’t do it out of necessity but luxury almost, and opportunity. When the subject of your photograph might be underprivileged somehow, and you are documenting that in the form of a portrait, what is your take on that experience?

I use that same word when I talk about travel – luxury. It’s such a white man’s headache you know, like, it’s not hard. People say “How did you do that? That’s so hard.” And I think, “Well there are some cold days, some warm days, you know..” But it’s my own choice, and it’s a privilege entirely.

I think my interpretation of that person at that moment in that location is kind of as simple as I can explain it.

When I tried to catalogue Citizen, everything was so different. Baz Luhrman, Malcolm Fraser, a prostitute, and then a child sex-offender… To me it’s that moment, the reason I photographed you and what you were to me when I met you. Surely, there is more to them as a person but I don’t know that. Some of the meetings, it’s five minutes. Six frames and we all move on.

I think my interpretation of that person at that moment in that location is kind of as simple as I can explain it. I don’t try to tell anything. I think I try to communicate with myself more than anything.

Willy, Trout River NP, Newfoundland, Canada

Does the time that you spend and the energy that you share with someone have an affect on the portrait?

I think I’m pretty controlling. I see something and that’s my square. And then I just wait for someone to come around and say, “Can I take your portrait?” If you control the environment that you want to put someone in, I can be really loose and free with them. You know that everything around them is taken care of. Now I can just look at what they do. While I talk to people, I get to look at them closely. People do things all the time that are great. I add that back in because that’s what I want to photograph but, you know, I was too slow.

Nick Cave, Musician, Melbourne, Australia, 2001

Leanne & Wendell, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Angus Young, Musician, Sydney, Australia, 2003

Lets talk about squares. Not only do you photograph within a square frame, often, but it’s rather popular these days.

Instagram, damn them. If I could sue them I could!

After the army, I ended up working in Hasselblad, the Swedish camera manufacturer, joining cog wheels and stuff. I ended up acquiring a cheap camera because I was staff. So that’s the square, the Hasselblad 503, 500. A lot of master photographers at the time used these cameras, Irving Penn for instance. Having one of those, getting one of those in my hand, I loved it.

Now I look at things and it’s just a line going around a square crop – the one lens, one camera, and I just like it. It’s calming I guess, the four equal sides. You can fill it from any which way so many times over and it’s endless. It’s like Sudoku, you know, all different solutions.

Tom & Brandy, Cape Lookout, Oregon, USA

Betlapar, Borkana, Bihar, India

Marco, Lago Castor, Chile

I was hoping to ask about the introduction to Chasing Summer – written by Paul Theroux. Why precede the book with an essay?

I found his literary publisher in New York and sent him a copy – and then 911 happened that week. Then there was the Anthrax scare. A year later, he’d been in Africa researching his next book, he came back and found the book and loved it. He said he didn’t have time to write something, he was trying to write a novel, but there were three short story books. “Use anything you want.”

I think I was hell bent on having someone that looked upon travel in some way that you can’t read in my photographs. I wanted a take on the experience of travel and letting go, and what he wrote just suited it perfectly.

It seems to me that this is the golden age of amateur photography. How do professionals, that is those who are committed documentary, editorial, photojournalists, how do we go about telling stories that are convincing and compelling in a visually saturated environment?

National Geographic photographer Sam Abell has defined his career with patience. There is no dull section of a Sam Abell photograph, the frame is layered from back to front with compelling imagery. This can be a slow process, it can take days, weeks, or in some cases months for the right opportunity to present itself.

There were many rafts over the course of the four years and all were built with salvaged materials. The construction boom happening in NYC in the mid-2000s provided a lot of scrap material that we pulled from dumpsters.

I love the unexpected, uncontrollable moments that just happen. That’s why I suppose spontaneity is really the crux of the best art I’ve done. That, and I just really love the process of making things.

There are countless stories that tell of a young man, lost and uncertain, who sets out on a whirlwind adventure and figures out who he really is. It is a sad reality that amongst the great classic adventure stories, very few (if any) of the protagonists are female.

I perceive my photographic work through a director’s eyes, however, the difference in my vision, is that the whole world is a stage. It’s an intense sensation of “limitless”. I like to recreate a fantastic universe of dreams and travels.

Arriving back in Marrakech, I felt like I had truly been to outer space and back; I felt like I had seen landscapes that could not exist on our planet. I felt like I had stepped both back and out of time and had seen and briefly experienced a different way of living, of one without time and without fear.

Photography is a fiction. It’s a frame of a film which hasn’t been made, or a line from a forgotten poem. I always create in camera as much as possible, because it is also about the experience of what is in front of you at the time.

It’s surprising to see a lot of people’s living spaces of a certain age – what they surround themselves with and how they decorate their houses. They’re like living museums. It’s often an incredible level of chaos and madness that they live amongst

Porter Yates is a photographer, and Dan Melamid is a director. They have been friends for many years, and both share a passion for travel and visual storytelling. Through Witness.Earth they have collaborated to develop a new style of photographic presentation to music.

Thematically, (Katrin’s) work is concerned with ideas of Australian regional and remote communities in socio-economic transition in the 21st century; experientially, it is an exploration of photographer’s familiarity with her new home country.

Wild & Precious brings together treasures from a series of road trips travelled over 5 years by photographer Jesse Burke and his daughter Clover. It’s a reminder that exploration is timeless, and infinite, as should be the wild.

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with the ocean, and I think a large part of my focus in documenting it focuses on my curiosity and admiration for it… I’ve been circled by bullsharks, thrown over the falls at Teahupoo, ravaged by swarms of sea lice, bounced off the reef at Pipeline, had a jet ski thrown over my head in Australia…

My driving force is to discover places and creations that I personally find intriguing. As for what I’m trying to communicate to an audience, it is a more focused critical perspective, something that I will develop over time.

While cycling about in remote South Australia Tom was bitten on the neck by a reback spider and, after suffering through the night, made it to hospital the following day to be dosed up on two bags of anti-venom. Another time, while hiking Tasmania’s magnificent Overland Track through constant rainfall, a leech found its way quietly into his mouth.

At the age of 22, Larry Niehues packed his bags and headed to Mcallen in south Texas. Following the footsteps of Bruce Davidson, William Eggleston and Dennis Hopper, he embarked on his own great American road trip.

I struggle a little bit with my attraction to old things, but I like small towns and they are usually a little behind the times. At least landscapes are timeless. I can’t be accused of nostalgia when photographing nature.

Creativity runs through your veins. Photography is just a way to capture what you need to express. You see something that moves you, it doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful, and you take a picture of it. Creativity is tied to anything that makes you tick. In my case it is the outdoors.

Ittoqqortoormiit is one of the most insulated towns in the world. Far away from all touristic highways and only accessible by helicopter. Two supply ships a year, and if you forget to lodge a request you must wait six more months for this.

I try to approach these trips and films with an open mind as to what I might find. I think its really important to spend time with the people, and let them tell you about what they would like to tell you before filming them or attempting to interview them.

Maybe in some of these places there has never been human presence, I access them with my kayak or by boat. Sometimes I’m lucky, and I go alone, sometimes I go with my groups. Either way I’m very lucky, I can see other worlds within this world. I’m very lucky to experience this.

We want to make people aware about how difficult the living and working conditions in certain parts of the world can be, the fact that not everybody was born into the bright side of life but also that travelling to far away places is possible – through photographs.

The Family Acid sounds something like an adult swim cartoon, but the truth is so much more awesome. They are in fact responsible for some of the most visually intriguing and detailed documentation of the counter cultural movement of the 1970’s on, out of the U.S and beyond.

That was a life changing time with two wonderful women and their amazing father who are dear friends of mine. They are sailors but it was a first for me to be out at sea for two weeks. The best way to explore any coast on a magic carpet ride!

It was an amazing, incredible sight to see hundreds of people on this beach. The horses went in first, four or five horses into the water, then the saints were immersed, and then everybody else went in after that to take the ritual bath.

I make an effort to let everyone I photograph know what I’m up to. I want them to understand where I am coming from. I think when they meet me they realise I’m not out to expose or judge them. Who am I to expose something or someone anyway?

This series is the first time I’ve ventured into photojournalism. The opportunity fell into place; I happened to be at the right place at the right time. I wasn’t prepared for the evident increase in poaching and anti-poaching activity this time around, and that was a shock. It’s a strange series to reflect on.